I ditched corporate America in 1994 and started a management consulting and venture capital firm (http://petercohan.com). I started following stocks in 1981 when I was in grad school at MIT and started analyzing tech stocks as a guest on CNBC in 1998. I became a Forbes contributor in April 2011. My 11th book is "Hungry Start-up Strategy: Creating New Ventures with Limited Resources and Unlimited Vision" (http://goo.gl/ygaUV). I also teach business strategy and entrepreneurship at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass.

But that will leave the other 22 in need of some lessons — first, they’re not heroes and second, they can be successful entrepreneurs if they can master 45 skills that a college education could provide.

Those are two key conclusions based on my June 22 interview with Professor of Entrepreneurship, Candida Brush at Babson College — for the 18th year in a row, ranked U.S. News & World Report’s #1 undergraduate entrepreneurship program.

According to Brush, the idea that entrepreneurs are born, heroic figures with un-teachable psychological traits has been around for 100 years. Stanford Law School alum, Thiel, appears to believe in this idea. It certainly helps to reinforce his effort to encourage people to drop out of college to start companies.

One inconvenient truth is that there are 113,000 papers cited in Google (GOOG) Scholar that contradict the idea of entrepreneurs as born and not trainable. Brush points out that the academic research shows that education is correlated with start-up success.

More specifically, she cites research that shows the probability of start-up survival is 7% for a company started by an entrepreneur with no college education or industry expertise — with both education and industry expertise, the odds of start-up survival rise to 77%. And the same benefits of education and industry expertise hold true for start-up profitability — without them there’s an 8% chance of profits; with them a 61% probability.

What exactly do entrepreneurs get out of an education? Brush cites work by Babson Professor, Patti Greene and her colleagues that detail 45 “roles and tasks” that entrepreneurs perform. These 45 roles and tasks include creating new products and services, inspiring others to embrace the vision and values of the company, and controlling costs.

Babson is using these 45 to create a so-called Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy Scale that aspiring entrepreneurs can use to rank themselves. In so doing, they can identify their strengths and opportunities for improvement in these 45 roles and tasks. And education can help them improve where they’re weak.

Babson is not the only one, Brush estimates that there are about 2,500 programs that teach entrepreneurship.

Evidence suggests that Thiel’s paid college drop-outs would boost their odds of entrepreneurial success by attending such a program — case closed.

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